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Background information
"The photographs of Greece by Walter HEGE and Herbert LIST were taken in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the reception of ancient temple architecture moved between the idea of a formerly sacred site and a romantic aesthetic of ruins. Through the lens of Walter HEGE, we see the temples as a metaphor for political power and the claim to power of the early Athenian democracy. It supported the common, conservative myth.
In contrast, the architectural fragments in the photographic aesthetic of Herbert LIST are composed still lifes. In Greece, he deliberately played with chance as a compositional element, with backlit shots and occasionally with double exposures. His photographs of ruins stage an idyll of their own.
Walter HEGE was interested in the temple as a spatial body, as a historically significant architectural achievement, while Herbert LIST was interested in its surfaces, in the ruins of the temple fragment. Both photographers did not create objective images, but interpreted and staged the Greek temples with the help of the camera. They exemplify two basic photographic convictions: context-bound accuracy of representation versus alienation through narrow image sections or: realism versus abstraction. The work thus becomes a model investigation of two approaches within architectural photography." (© Reimer Verlag, 2003)